Critical Role Moves to Tabletop with Darrington Press; Warchief Gaming Prepares for Publication

Two new tabletop game publishers announced themselves in late October 2020, with both originating from existing gaming organizations.

• The web series Critical Role has launched Darrington Press, which will be headed by designer/author Ivan Van Norman, with CR's Matthew Mercer serving as the company's creative advisor. Darrington Press' first release will come in Q1 2021, with Uk'otoa being a 3-5 player game from Jeb Havens and Gabriel Hicks. Here's a summary of what's going on in the game:

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A battle for life and death is taking place on the high Lucidian seas!

Art and components not final

In the tactical semi-cooperative game Uk'otoa, factions of sailors vie to be the last claimed by the raging sea leviathan Uk'otoa. As the ship slowly falls into the ocean, you have to run, push, and sacrifice others to win!

Other titles on the release calendar for Darrington Press, with descriptions from the publisher, are:

—Critical Role Adventures (Q2 2021): "Embark on your own journey through Exandria with Critical Role Adventures! Play as the upstart adventurers Vox Machina and overcome treacherous challenges. This cooperative legacy-lite campaign game uses a unique, narrative mechanism for social and combat encounters, luring you back session after session. Within this enormous box, you'll find a host of hidden treasures and a rich storybook to guide you through thrilling combat, dynamic character growth, and tales worthy of the name Vox Machina."

—Syndicult (Q3 2021): "Syndicult is an original modern magic role-playing game designed by Matthew Mercer in which mob families jealously guard secrets and battle it out for power on the city streets. Featuring a simple storytelling dice mechanism, Syndicult is a low magic world where all bets are off."

—Guardians of Matrimonia (Q4 2021): "Fight the monsters, save the party! Guardians of Matrimonia is a co-operative card game in which players have pre-built decks that are pitted against a deck of monsters (party crashers). If your deck runs out, everyone loses — but if you battle your way through the entire party crasher deck, everyone wins!"

• The other new publisher is [company=46979]Warchief Gaming[/company], which started as a tabletop gaming club in 2018, with this club being founded by Chris Metzen and Mike Gilmartin, both former VPs of Blizzard Entertainment.

Here's an excerpt from the press release announcing the new company:

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The pivot from gaming club to tabletop development studio felt like a natural one. Having retired from Blizzard over four years ago, Metzen realized he had worlds in his head he wanted to explore on his own terms — and his partnership with Gilmartin offered a strong foundation upon which to build something new.

Metzen and Gilmartin are committed to enhancing the community and elevating the services that gaming clubs can provide, while at the same time building their own worlds and products. This will continue to be a focus for the Warchief team, and the founders have already tapped the talent of former Blizzard Entertainment game designer Ryan Collins (Hearthstone) as Lead Product Developer to help turn Warchief's big ideas into reality.

"I missed the creative collaboration I had for so many years at Blizzard," said Metzen. "It's amazing to get back to building worlds and telling stories with my friends at Warchief. I feel like I'm twenty again — well, my imagination does, at least."

Warchief Gaming hasn't announced any releases at this time, but says that it will start releasing information before the end of 2020. Dean Takahashi interviewed Metzen and Gilmartin for a long article on VentureBeat about their efforts to overcome burnout at Blizzard and return to their gaming roots with Warchief.